Rock Star Poet Review

Jed Gustafson is the owner/operator of RockDenver.com, he's a booking agent/promoter, and a singer/bass player. Now he's also a published author. He recently wrote a book of poetry called Rock Star Poet that's available at The Tattered Cover and The Boulder Book Store.

Arnold Adoff once said "I really want a poem to sprout roses and spit bullets; this is the ideal combination..." and this is what Jed Gustafson's poems did for me as I unfolded the pages and let loose its meaning. Rock Star Poet invites you to examine life at its basic and other times convoluted stages. At times I felt as if I was swept up in circus revelry, images and connotations looming into my mind's view, almost leering and jeering, cajoling my spirit to run away with its crew of carnies. Other times, Gustafson's words seemed to call softly out to me, like sirens, beckoning my emotions to follow them until they crashed upon the rocks of reality. In either sense, Gustafson's Rock Star Poet was a lyrical piece in which the different poems seemed to dance with issues that can either make or break our lives, depending on what we give up and that which we take in: love, loss, innocence gone, sex, the darkness that consumes our minds and tries to control our spirits.it's all in there.

"Lying bedridden, staring at the walls,
the mind is taking you places
you don't want to go.
Shhh, do you hear the voices,
The voices of creatures that dance before my bed,
Reminding me of things that I once did."

(from "Four White Walls In A Little Black Room")

The magical thing about good poetry is that it resembles life, changing and evolving, sometimes contorting in front of your eyes; as you read it the second time, you realize the words are speaking to a different part of your soul, a different experience, like a therapist, bringing out secret experiences you might have hidden long ago, you read on and emphatically mutter, "been there too!" Rock Star Poet presented this precise piece, titled "Old Dam" whose atmosphere was that of uncertainty, recognition, and then understanding of the self. Upon reading, I would flashback upon similar experiences and familiar feelings for I have too (as many of you) felt like, "Occasionally a drop gets through, now and then, a couple at a time. Some of the time she owns me, and sometimes she is mine."

Jed Gustafson invites you for a ride in Rock Star Poet. I suggest you take it and let it entice the eyes and invite the ears, in the end, he opens the exchange of information that reinforces the transformation of the human spirit, life, and the way in which we grow, reflecting upon those instances, those emotions, that make us who we are.

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Rock Star Poet gives an uncommon voice to the commonplace and explores and explodes the oft-times narrow gap between the abject and the exalted...